1080p HD movies onto your Android SD card [fat32] [solutions]

Q. Hi. I read your 1080p phone/tablet MKV playback list and tested my SGS2 and you are right it works with 1080p MKVs amazing! Really enjoy it. However, I only have a few 1080p things that fit under the 4GB limit of FAT32 🙁 How can I get full 1080p HD movies onto my phone??? I don’t mind doing a little bit but I don’t want to re-encode a bunch. Thx! –AndroidMovieFan

The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GB minus 1 byte or 4 294 967 295 (232−1) bytes. This limit is a consequence of the file length entry in the directory table and would also affect huge FAT16 partitions with a sufficient sector size.[1]Video applications, large databases, and some other software easily exceed this limit. Larger files require another filesystem. Wikipedia

A. Great question and I’m glad you are enjoying 1080p on your phone! I totally understand not wanting to fully re-encode your movies to fit the 4GB limit, since it would take time and would degrade the video quality. So, here are a couple strategies you can try for full 1080p MKV files on your FAT32 SD card:

#1 Split your MKVs into < 4GB pieces easily and without re-encoding:

How to Split MKV Files | eHow.comhttp://www.ehow.com/how_5162610_split-mkv-files.htmlClick the “Add File” button, circled in red in image provided. This will begin the process. This will split the MKV into whichever size segments you went with in the…

This is a nice, an relatively easy, method for taking large movies and simply splitting them (without re-encoding) to make them work within the FAT32 file size limitation.

#2 When you backup your BluRay discs, do it in a manner compatible with FAT32:

I do not recommend downloading this movie since that would be illegal, but you CAN just look at the file listing to see that it is an example of a movie that someone has backed up into (2) parts which will easily fit on FAT32 partitions!

The future: better file system support for SD/SDHC/SDXC formatting

Android will likely eventually support other filesystems (ext2/ext3/ext4 etc.) that will make this all moot 🙂

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2011.10.01 Update from: AndroidMovieFan

Q. Thank you for the tips! I tried #1 and it worked and I had no idea that #2 people were already encoding movies to get around this limitation! Thanks again 🙂 Android rocks I just wish they had better SD card formatting 🙁

Filesystem support on SD card – Android Forumshttp://androidforums.com/htc-hero/26549-filesystem-support-sd-card.htmlHi, Just wondering if the Hero supports other filing systems other than fat32 on SD (stock rom – no root), I would like to run ext2 ideally. Cheers

3 Surprising Things About Video On Android Tabletshttp://niallohiggins.com/2011/03/07/3-surprising-things-about-video-on-android-tablets/An obvious killer app for this kind of device is video. At the distance you hold a tablet it has the same apparent size as a massive TV screen. The easy-to-hold and carry form…

6 comments

Hi! i have a very similar problem but unfortunately none of these are solutions for my problem. i am downloading torrents on my android phone – for many reasons it works better for me than doing it on my PC. i am trying to download one which has some 8 gig files in it. i do get an error message that the file exceeds the limitations and im looking for a workaround.. Thanks in advance! Mik

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find aany way to successfully download files larger than 4GB on my Android phone or tablet. 🙁

Of course there are all the solutions that use a PC (i.e. re-encoding, splitting the files, etc.) but of course that does not help if we want to exclusively use our Android phone! Hopefully soon Google will enable a new file system format on Android so that > 4GB files will easily be supported on today’s superphones. 🙂

J.D. is an attorney and IT professional living off the grid. He has been a tech enthusiast ever since his dad let him play with computers in the early 80s. Now jdhodges.com is where he shares tech tips. Thanks for visiting & feel free to join in the discussion by commenting :-)